It’s true and weird that while both Half-Life games are considered influential and important, hardly any of what was uniquely compelling about them made it into anything else. It’s still hard to find anything that feels like it does what they did: dynamically-chatty bit-part characters with interesting behaviours, NPC classes with specific attitudes to each other, dozens of elaborate one-off scripted behaviours, the continuous sense of not being the main character. Both games are full of stubs of situations that you could build a whole game around.
The Search For The Apolitical Video Game
Exploitative Game Design: Beyond the F2P Debate
The past few months have seen a torrent of articles about Free-to-Play business models, often discussed alongside issues of ethics in games (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). These pieces have addressed the effect on addiction-prone players or children, the possibility of corrupting artistic intent, the sheer amount of money being spent, and other advantages and dangers of F2P. While all of this is relevant, I fear that we’re focusing too much on F2P and glossing over the wider ethical issues in game design.
Aesthetic Deception
Ico, disruptive game design, and experiences that live forever.
100 updates later. Why we enjoy games, why we stop, and how live game design might bring us back.
A Lament For The LAN Party
Before broadband and the connected world of information, we found different ways to mix our social life and our games. …
Hylics 2 Takes CRAZY To The NEXT LEVEL!
Temporarily Offline
A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.
[BtS E3] Did the last playable scene feel "off" to anyone else.
378 votes, 132 comments. 180K subscribers in the lifeisstrange community. Life is Strange is a series of games, published by Square Enix, revolving…
Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend.sh)
1. solitude: single-player game loop 2. bottomlessness: infinite scroll 3. speed: instant delivery/gratification 4. teasing: generally satisfactory, never perfect; “maybe the next one is exactly what I want” ↘️ quoting NPR (@npr.org): Taken together, these four features can create a trancelike state that can keep us stuck on social media apps or video games for hours. Children are particularly vulnerable. n.pr/4mH6i6s
» The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy The Digital Antiquarian
Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)
500+ Billion Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile A First-Person Shooter
During the last 3 months, I spent some of my time and tokens decompiling a popular first-person shooter. The goal was not to reach a simple proof-of-concept state. Instead, we really wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game. The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had previously written two posts that have since been removed. Everyone else might now be wondering which game I am talking about. To both of you I can only say that corporate America was here to ruin our fun.
Recognizing Vibe Coded Games | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Turn-based RPG Entropy offers up a world abandoned by the gods that looks like a PS1 game fished from a toilet
Come wallow in the demo for Entropy, an absorbingly ugly take on the Final Fantasy RPG format from the creators of Dread Delusion.
Gaming is not the most important thing in my life
This is what people ask when they find out what I do. I have a stock answer: Super Mario 64. It's probably not my favorite game, but it satisfies people. It's a game they've heard of and that we all can agree was important. It's one of my favorite games, sure, but that's where my love for it ends.
Bad Game Design - Clicker Games